The One that Got Away (April 22, 2018)

Paul is sick today and we just couldn’t manage a show. But here’s a little thing from the archives. A few years ago Paul read portions of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to the kids. Not every chapter—just the ones he thought would be the most fun to read out loud. Here’s his recording of chapters 28 through 31, which feature the characters of Ahab, Stubb, Flask, and the mysterious dream-merman. He made a few introductory comments—if you find that part uninteresting and want to get straight to Melville, skip ahead to 7:30. The whole file is a bit over 31 minutes long.

What’s the point of this? Moby-Dick has a certain reputation, partially deserved, as a heavy and discursive book, hard to read—but it is also very beautifully written, and very funny in parts. Paul wanted to present some evidence of this, and capture why his kids found it entertaining.

Really, Moby-Dick is several books in one, in several different styles, all of them subtle, satirical, and self-referential, often breaking the fourth wall, and often revelatory of the quick mind and long experience of the narrator, Ishmael. Stubb is every bit as funny and touching a comic sidekick as Shakespeare’s famous sidekicks, like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. Ahab even seems to speak in blank verse, or something close to it.

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